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Withal, Notre Dame has not forgotten football. Like its once-helpful victim, West Point, it believes in the game as a character builder. Moreover, football nets $500,000 a year. But nowadays Notre Dame imposes strict standards on its prime beef, requiring a 77% average for varsity players against the 70% passing mark. And Hesburgh can permit himself a gibe at Notre Dame's 58,000-seat football stadium as "the civic opera."
"I'm Going to Be a Priest." The priest who dares to kid about football comes from a comfortable, informal home in Syracuse, N.Y., where he was the son of a plate-glass plant manager of German-French descent. "We were middle class, pure and simple.'' says Hesburgh. He went to parochial schools, served as an altar boy, got to be a Life Scout, built model airplanes, liked to hunt and fish, once played Christ in a passion play, and graduated third in his high school class. What made the quick, dark-eyed boy different was his voracious reading and early ambition. At twelve, he was asked by a Holy Cross priest what he wanted to be when he grew up—fireman, policeman, explorer? Snapped Hesburgh: "I'm going to be a priest, Father. Like you.''
Duly impressed, Father Thomas Duffy scribbled down Hesburgh's name and attributes ("fine boy, bright"), eventually steered him to Notre Dame. After one year on campus, Hesburgh took his novitiate year at a wilderness camp in Rolling Prairie, Ind. Up at 5 every morning, the novices prayed, read and recited in Latin; prayed, chopped trees, and built a silo. For the voluble Hesburgh, the toughest rule was silence for 22 hours a day. "It was a boot camp," says Hesburgh.
From an original class of 29, Hesburgh and eight others survived to take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. He was not fleeing the world, he says: "I liked dancing. I liked everything. But I thought there was something more to life. By really belonging to nobody except God, you belong to everybody."
Hebrew in Latin. At Rome's Gregorian University, Hesburgh absorbed theology. The classes, including the class in Hebrew, were taught in Latin, and "the dormitory talk was French, the street talk Italian." He also picked up Spanish, and later, Portuguese. Ordered home in wartime 1940, Hesburgh continued his studies at Catholic University. When he was ordained in 1943, Hesburgh begged to be a military chaplain, was ordered instead to work for his S.T.D. (Doctorate of Sacred Theology), which he earned in 1945. Hoping for missionary work, he fetched up teaching a course on moral virtue at Notre Dame.
Again plunging into extra work, Hesburgh became chaplain to Notre Dame's married veterans who swarmed over an area known as "Fertile Valley." Hesburgh badgered obstetricians for discount deliveries, baptized babies and baby-sat in return for sandwiches and beer. He got so adept at marriage counseling that he once reunited a couple after a three-year split.